Last week we took a poll asking for your favorite ‘light’ blogging service. These are blogging services that make it very easy for you to share content and media. While old-school blogging service Blogger.com got the most votes in our poll, newer slicker services such as Tumblr, Soup.io and the recently trendy Posterous are popular with early adopters.
Many people are only just coming to know the newer services like Posterous, so in this post we give you 5 tips to get the most out of them. The post is in the same vein as our earlier How to use Facebook one.
1. Post Lots of Media
Blogging started out in the early days as a text-heavy medium; and to this day professional blogs (such as ReadWriteWeb) rely mostly on text. But the whole point of light blogging – sometimes called micro-blogging – is to be more casual and colorful. So post lots of media: photos, video, audio. Most light blogging services offer a browser bookmarklet, which enables you to post media at the click of a button.
Here’s an example of easily published media from a Posterous blog called ReflectionOf.Me:
2. Subscribe to Other People (& Re-Blog)
One thing that hasn’t changed about blogging is the sense of community. Half the fun of maintaining a blog is reaching out to your network. So be proactive in finding people who blog about similar things as you, then link to them and even re-blog their posts (copy and paste – it’s much more accepted in light blogging than in professional blogging!).
At this stage, the market leader Tumblr still offers you the best chance of finding like-minded souls – due to the sheer number of people using it. Here’s an example of community from a Tumblr user called rudie. Note the “following” panel on the right, which lists the other blogs that rudie follows.
3. Aggregate Content From Your Other Apps
With light blogging, you needn’t even spend time actually blogging – because you can pull in content automatically from other apps. While FriendFeed and even Facebook are common methods for many of us to aggregate our content from across the web (a.k.a. ‘lifestreaming’), it’s just as easy to do so using Tumblr, Posterous or Soup.io.
To the right is an example from my own Soup.io blog. Every week Soup.io polls last.fm and automatically publishes the top 5 artists I’ve listened to in the past week.
4. Customize Your Theme
All of the leading light blogging services offer a variety of colorful themes. If you’re handy with HTML and/or CSS, you can customize your template too – if you want to make it unique. Here’s a cool MySpace-esque design from Tumblr user Juice in a Box:
5. Don’t Take it Seriously
It’s not called light blogging for nothing (actually it wasn’t called light blogging at all, until we clumsily coined it!). Services such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io make it very easy to experiment with blogging, have fun, see new things, meet new people. Why not give it go…
From Sween’s Tumblr blog
